Director

Nino Martinez Sosa studied film at Santo Domingo University. He moved to Spain and began a prolific career as an editor working in several awarded feature films and documentaries that had led him to countries such as Puerto Rico, Peru, Nicaragua, U.S.A., Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. He founded the production company Balsié Guanábana Macuto in his home country that serves as a launchpad for his director’s career and partner with Fernando Santos and Guasábara Cine to produce Liborio, his first feature film.

He has taught classes and give lectures in many film schools and art centers such as the EICTV, ECAM, NIC, CICE, Chavon Art School, and the Docnomads Erasmus Mundus Joint master’s degree. In 2009 he became a member of the Spanish Film Academy, and since 2012 he’s a member of the European Film Academy.

Emma Francis-Snyder is a New York based activist and documentary filmmaker. With Takeover she is a 2020 Ford Foundation: Just Films and Open Society Foundation grantee. She attended the 2019 Reykjavik International Film Festival Talent Lab. She is a 2017 UnionDocs Summer Fellow and the winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Film Festival Exchange pitch. In 2012 Emma, and co-director, Sara Beth Curtis, received the Rosen Fellowship and traveled to Santiago, Chile and Montreal, Quebec to film the simultaneous student movements. She is the co-producer of the film, Straight/Curve, and the associate producer of Yoruba Richen’s award-winning I Rise series.

Academy Award winning producers/directors Alan and Susan Raymond (I Am A Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School) are among America’s most influential documentary filmmakers working today. Recognized by the IDA as Lifetime Achievement Trailblazers for directors of the PBS cinema verite series An American Family that gave birth to Reality TV as well as their Emmy, Peabody and DuPont Award winning The Police Tapes that opened the doors for small format video on network television.  The Raymonds have produced award winning social issue documentaries on education, religion, criminal justice and war reporting in Rwanda as well as Elvis ’56 deemed by Rolling Stone Magazine as the very best film on Elvis.

Raja Amari was born in Tunis, Tunisia. After receiving a Masters in French Literature from the University of Tunis, she graduated from La FEMIS, the French school for cinematic studies. Her first feature film Red Satin (2002), premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, won numerous awards and was acclaimed by the public and the press. Her second film, Buried Secrets, was presented in Official selection at the 66th Venice Film Festival. It was screened at the MoMA and the African Diaspora International Film Festival, among others. In 2014, she directed Tunisian Spring, a TV film for Arte Télévision. Her film Foreign Body had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2016 and its US Premiere at the African Diaspora International Film Festival in 2017. Raja Amari became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2019. She Had a Dream, her latest TV film for Arte Television, had its world premiere at IDFA 2020.

Angelo Madsen Minax works in film and video, sound and music, text, installation, and sometimes other media too. His projects explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological kinships, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena, and often draw on autoethnography. Madsen’s works have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Tom of Finland Institute, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, KurzFilm Hamburg, Berlinale, Tribeca Film Festival, the European Media Art Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Berwick Media Arts Festival, Alchemy Festival of Moving Image, and dozens of LGBT film festivals around the world. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont and a Queer|Art Mentor.

Ronald Llewellyn Jones is a Texas based multidisciplinary artist whose artwork explores barriers between creatives and audiences while including conversations regarding individuals and their communities. Jones challenges each individual’s respective perceptions in regards to the availability of access and agency within normative societal structures.

PJ Raval is more recently known as an award-winning filmmaker than he is an ex-scientist born on Tax Day. Growing up as a queer, first-generation Filipino American in a small, white, conservative town in California’s central valley, PJ’s outsider experience greatly shaped his filmmaking practice. PJ’s work examines social justice issues through the voices of queer and marginalized subjects. Named one of Out Magazine’s ‘OUT 100′ and IndieWIRE’s ‘25 LGBT Filmmakers on the Rise 2019’, PJ’s body of film work has been distributed widely internationally and has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, Bertha Foundation, Arcus Foundation, Sundance, Center for Asian-American Media, Tribeca Film Institute, Firelight Media, PBS, and the Ford Foundation. PJ is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, 2016 Firelight Media Fellow, 2017 Robert Giard Fellow, a Producers Guild of America member, and a recent member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Jonathan Caouette is invested in breaking from the traditional rules of narrative filmmaking. He has been a prolific filmmaker for the past 35 years, directing short films, music videos and three feature-length documentaries: Tarnation (2004), All Tomorrow’s Parties (2009), and Walk Away Renee (2012).

A native of Washington, DC, Jenny graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts with a MFA in Film Production where she won a directing scholarship and focused on writing, directing, and producing scripted and documentary films. While at USC, she produced several scripted and documentary thesis projects, including her own 35mm thesis film Searching for Angels which screened at the DGA’s First Look Festival. In addition to producing and directing several shorts, past credits include producing on the feature The Preacher’s Daughter and the feature documentary The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing. The latest short film she wrote and directed, the award-winning Acid Test, screened at festivals all over the world including BendFilm Festival, Austin Film Festival, and was selected for the 2018 Women in Film and Television International (WIFTI) Short Film Showcase and the 2019 AFS Shortcase at SXSW. While not making films, she teaches filmmaking and is the Program Coordinator at Houston Community College’s Filmmaking Program. Jenny is thrilled to bring its feature adaptation to life and relive her tumble through self-discovery in the early 1990’s.